


Dresser

by linguamortua



Category: Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Consensual Infidelity, Cunnilingus, Dressing Room Sex, F/M, Femdom, Historical Dress
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-13
Updated: 2019-04-13
Packaged: 2020-01-12 11:39:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18445793
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/linguamortua/pseuds/linguamortua
Summary: ‘Vanity, Diana,’ Stephen began, but she immediately waved her hand at him.‘Kindly do not lecture me on vanity, when aside from matters of appearance you are quite the most egotistical creature alive,’ she said. ‘I have read your entire paper on the reproductive life of marsupials, and with you hovering about like a mother hen over her eggs. Any woman would be ashamed to angle so obviously for compliments.’





	Dresser

**Author's Note:**

  * For [libraralien](https://archiveofourown.org/users/libraralien/gifts).



> What a fun set of prompts this was! I tried to combine them all into something with a light, fun, affectionate vibe.

Stephen was running out of ink and his pen was squeaking away on the paper. In his meticulous code, he was articulating the precise balance of power in certain sovereign nations, clarifying his thoughts so that his reports to Sir Joseph would not contain the kind of half-witted thinking and scurrilous rumour that plagued the intelligence services generally. A certain point of legislation was giving him trouble. Besides, his head pained him. 

After a while he threw down his pen in disgust and went to the shelf. A generous slug of laudanum had a way of solving intractable problems. Stephen swirled it in the glass, gritty and dark, and swallowed it down without tasting the bitterness. Almost immediately he began to feel better. He had become pleasantly warm and relaxed when the outside door opened and closed with a great crash. Diana came sweeping in, her long cape flowing behind her and her arms full of bundles. 

‘Stephen,’ she said, her face charmingly rosy and a long wisp of black hair escaping from its braid. ‘Have you moved, dear heart, since I saw you last? You still have jam from breakfast on your shirt, I perceive.’

‘You miss nothing, Diana,’ said Stephen. He proffered his cheek for a kiss; her lips and nose were cold.

Instantly she swished away into her dressing room, her heels clicking on the floor. And just as immediately cursed, some vulgar sailor’s expression. Stephen noted with detached interest the erotic effect it had on him. 

‘Why do you curse, wife?’ he called, wiping his pen and stoppering the ink jar.

‘This damned girl,’ Diana said, reappearing at the door. ‘My blue silk is quite crumpled, and she has somehow bent the ostrich feather in my hat. I told her very clearly not to touch it. I am quite sure that she wears my clothes when I am not at home. Lord, Stephen, how I wish we could engage someone with half a brain. A quarter of a brain, even.’

Out of deference to the extreme secrecy of his career, Stephen refused to countenance hiring any but the most lumpish specimens to wait upon his table, his house and his wife. Indeed, were it not for Diana’s insistence on servants, he would be happy to manage himself with no outside assistance. 

He made apologetic sounds. 

‘Let me,’ he said, crashing to his knees on the floor. His mouth was extremely dry for reasons that had nothing to do with the laudanum and everything to do with the slim arch of Diana’s foot in her expensive, tiny shoes. He unbuttoned them with suddenly-stupid fingers, numb and helpless now although he never, never was when he was operating. A ligature was nothing compared to the exquisite delicacy of removing Diana’s slipper. 

‘Good of you,’ Diana told him, flexing her foot in his hands. He pressed his thumbs into the arch. They slid smoothly across her silk stocking.

‘Where do you go tonight, wife?’ Stephen asked.

‘Oh, to Felicity’s—Lady Norfolk’s—rout.’ She said it very carelessly, as though it were nothing at all. In fact, the Norfolks ran in a raffish, fashionable sort of set, endlessly throwing balls and parties and seeming to do very little else. There was a scandal at some point, but the young, handsome couple were far too interesting to stay out of society’s favour for long. And Diana adored the female of the pair; ‘dear Felicity’ had never cared a jot who Diana had married or, more saliently, to whom she had been linked before becoming Mrs Maturin.

He ghosted his fingers up her leg, almost afraid to touch her, and rolled down one stocking and then the other.

‘How dirty the streets are,’ Diana said, inspecting the stockings as they lay on the floor like a snake’s shed skin. ‘They can’t have been cleaned this age. Stephen, would you be a darling?’

Stephen rose wordlessly and went to the kitchen. It was simple to set a copper basin of water by the fire to warm through. Soon, he picked it up with a towel over his hands and carried it to her dressing room. Diana was reading when he came in, and barely looked at him as he put the basin on the floor by her feet. Her rose-scented soap was sitting on a little blue dish on the washstand. He took it, knelt before her, and folded the warm towel onto his lap. 

Although Stephen could easily name every bone and feature in the human foot generally, when it came to Diana’s feet specifically, familiarity never bored him. Her feet twitched and flexed appealing, ticklish as he washed them one at a time. A spot of wet mud had soaked through her stocking on the back of her ankle; he rubbed it away with his index finger until it dissolved into the water and was gone. The laudanum made everything slightly unreal, but Stephen was also sure that he would remember that small, insignificant moment indefinitely. He looked up at Diana, watching her watching him, her lips a little parted.

‘Is my cream tussore fresh?’ Diana asked, as Stephen patted her feet dry. The weight of her heel resting on his sex should have been arousing. And yet his physical responses were dulled by his dose of laudanum. Only a delightful mental stimulation remained. This was not an uncommon phenomenon. Indeed, Diana rarely expected him to perform in the conventional sense, and he found that he did not miss what had never been a foundational part of his life to begin with. ‘Stephen?’ She poked his chest with her pointed toe, laughed.

‘Pray describe the beast in sensible terms,’ Stephen told her.

‘An enormous, billowing, fashionable thing with a high waist and black ribbons on the hem,’ she said. ‘I am quite sure you have seen it any number of times.’

‘I know it,’ he said. He rose and went into the back of the dressing room, where her frocks hung in neat covers. By lifting up the covers by turns, he eventually found the dress.

‘And my slippers!’ Diana called. ‘The black ones, with silver buckles.’ They were on the shelf. Stephen scooped them up by the heels.

When he came back to Diana, she was removing her long chemise and carelessly dropping it on the floor. Her stays were long gone and lay in a heap, strings trailing. She turned to examine herself in the mirror, breasts bare and filmy drawers doing nothing for decency.

‘Vanity, Diana,’ Stephen began, but she immediately waved her hand at him.

‘Kindly do not lecture me on vanity, when aside from matters of appearance you are quite the most egotistical creature alive,’ she said. ‘I have read your entire paper on the reproductive life of marsupials, and with you hovering about like a mother hen over her eggs. Any woman would be ashamed to angle so obviously for compliments.’ She turned and lifted a clean chemise from its place hanging over the dresser. Then she held her arms out to him, not to embrace him, but so that he could carefully put her dress on over her head, avoiding her elaborately styled hair. As her head emerged, she leaned forward to kiss him on the cheek. ‘Although, it was a very _good_ paper, Stephen.’

She was more correct than she knew about his vanity, he thought. It was his pleasure to turn her out for an evening event in the absence of her maid. He did not have to be present to know that she was almost always the most desirable woman wherever she went. Stephen himself had no interest in making himself pleasant to society; not for him, the bustle and flirtations of a rout. There were many men who would enjoy her company; and so, let them. For although Diana was frequently unfaithful, she was always discreet. They were not albatrosses, to mate for life. 

He turned for Diana’s dress, but she stopped him with gentle hands on his elbows. 

‘Stephen,’ she said, her voice now thick, lower than usual. She did not have to explain to him what it was that she wanted. Indeed, he had expected this. There was a comforting and ritualistic quality to these evenings that he spent arranging her for a party or a supper. Diana sat on the footstool by her dressing tables. Once again, Stephen found himself on his knees in front of her. Her knees were falling open. Together, their hands suddenly rushed and feverish, they pushed her dress and chemise up to her mid-thigh.

As he pulled down her drawers, the pale length of her thigh gave way to blood-darkness higher up. Stephen’s trembling fingers approached her sex, touched it. She fluttered and sucked in a breath. Stephen licked his lower lip and followed his fingers with his tongue. Hazily he felt her hands land in his hair, and trace the contours of his skull, along the parietal line. His cock felt heavy and warm, but it did not stir. He ignored it. Instead, he concentrated all his attention on her cunt. Curled his tongue into her; stroked her rhythmically, evenly, until it became almost soporific for him. The exact pressure of each of her fingertips on his scalp told him how to move and how firmly or lightly to touch her. Diana panted above him. The muscles of her thighs tensed and rippled against his cheeks.

Had he been more of a man, he thought, now would be the time that he would fuck her; while she was hovering on the edge, her back arched and her small clean feet pressed to his back. He used his fingers, instead, knowing precisely how. She said something vulgar, which Stephen could not quite hear through the sound of his mouth and hand against her cunt. Then a shudder, bone-deep, and the sweet pulse of her body around his fingers.

Stephen sighed with satisfaction, as if her orgasm had been his. 

By and by, they started to move a little and redress her. She stood so that Stephen could help her resettle the billows of the tussore correctly. He kissed her; she opened her mouth to his tongue quite readily, and petted his infrequently-shaven cheeks. There was no need at all for any lengthy speeches. Stephen wandered back to his desk and sat, and, in her dressing room, Diana worked on a number of apparently necessary womanly touches, which somehow took her longer than the rest of her toilet. The sounds of brushes and bottles and ribbons whispering—Stephen never could identify the precise mechanisms or even appreciate any difference in her appearance. 

He rested his chin on his hand, idly reviewing his notes.

When he awoke, the house was dark. Faintly, he could hear the wind outside. He peeled his face up from his desk, and somewhere out in the night heard the scream of a fox. As he swam back up into consciousness, damning his evening’s glass of laudanum for he had an obnoxious headache, he became aware that the house had become very cold.

Somewhere, Diana would be dancing or flirting in a riot of laughter; there would be lights, and drinks, and men. But his coat was tucked over his shoulders, and there was a stoneware hot water bottle at his feet. He was warm, and she would come back to him. Stephen relit a candle and placidly continued his work.


End file.
